Saturday, November 28, 2015

My new spin on notes

Every year I struggle with how to give notes to my students.  I have tired giving students cloze notes, cornell notes, no guides, key word keys and full copies of the notes.  I try to think about the grade level I'm teaching and focus my note plan on that.  Especially with my high school students I really want to teach them the skill of note taking, but then I think back to college and remembered that many of my teachers posted their slides.  I know that was almost 10 years ago, but I'm sure that things have progressed since then and most professors are posting their notes.  So this year, I am trying something new with my 10th and 11th grade chemistry students.  I plan on giving them the slides, but not the full set.  Some slides I include for emphasis or illustrative purposes.  I don't feel that I need to print those slides, but I will encourage students to take additional notes if they would like.  In addition, I will often have problems worked out on my slides to give the solution to a problem.  The student version on the notes don't have the answers filled in so that they can solve the problems themselves.

Click here for an example of what I'm going to try.  You can see my teacher copy with the full notes and the student copy.  I am going to print out the slides for them in the notes format so that students have room to take some notes.  I also made sure to label each packet with the unit name.  I keep it simple; so for this measurement unit I will call each packet Measurement 1, Measurement 2......  I know that students don't always keep things organized, so if their papers get out of order at least they will know which papers are from which unit.

What are you methods for giving notes?

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